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There is a spot-on post by Tobold which questions those players who play to acquire in-game currency (Optional Economies). It’s not that playing to get large amounts of gold is not a valid goal – it is; but some players do not care at all for the economies. It resounds for me as I am one of those players. Gold is just another token to get to the other end-goal.

With so much concentration on efficient gold farming and selling around, its good to see a blogger outlining that non-gold approaches are not silly. Playing for gold to me seems silly; I’d be better off working another job if I wanted to acquire extra money in my spare time. I don’t – I want to relax.

The findings of a wow wealth survey were published by Golden Crusade recently, and it indicates some interesting things about how much gold players in wow have. It also has some stats on how many of the respondents did some of the nefarious activities like botting, buying gold, item duplication, and some other deeds not well likes by the terms of service.

Essentially there are some very rich players in game, but the typical player is not even close to as wealthy as the raw average might indicate (i.e. median value is far lower than the average gold amount).

In summary:

The World of Warcraft Wealth Survey 2012 ran Sunday, October 28th, 2012 through Saturday, November 10th, 2012 and collected 11,344 usable results. Given these results the study found:

The average player gold is 302,593

Median player gold was 80,000 gold

81.63% of players are below average

If you’re feeling the pinch of being constantly using all the gold that you generate then I’d say you’re not alone. Most players are in a similar situation, where they are gradually building wealth, rather than hyper-building wealth quickly.

81% of players (not characters) are under the average of 300k total, and that 39% of players were under 50k. I know many players who are happy with 15k.

I sit typically in the middle of that range, where I think 30-40k total is not enough to have flexibility should I need it, but over 100K is far more gold than I think is needed for my typical game-play.

Funny that the numbers line up a little isn’t it. Would I like more gold? Sure, but I know I’d spend it right back down to the level I have now, as amassing a huge amount of gold does not offer a radically different play experience from what I am enjoying now. I have a repair mount, two legendary items, 4x character with epic flying, and all sorts of minor toys and purchased and craftable gear.

A large bank-roll is a good and worthy challenge for players, but essentially I do not know of anything which requires 500,000g to complete.

There is banter abroad about the USD $10 in game pet that can be traded between players, and yes, its a variation on what was happening before. The card game prizes and all sorts of other items could be traded between characters before, and this adds another way, which is admittedly far more obvious and direct. Tabards, mounts, special toys, flags, and a huge array of other junk are already available for purchase via ebay. It has not wrecked anything. This is another item with no actual impact on gameplay being sold.

Overall though the people this will impact the most is the people who are buying and selling gold – and if you’re doing that you really need to be quiet and sit down.

Take these scenarios:

Player who wants the pet, and buys it from Blizzard. Cost $10, with no impact to game.

Player who want the pet, and buys it from the AH using gold. Cost: a sack of gold depending on the market. and still no real impact to the rest of the community.

Player who buys the pet to sell on the AH for gold. They give their money to Blizzard instead of a illegitimate company, and get the sack of gold. they’ll be looking to sell it on servers where the cub is rare, and hoping to clean-up. Tools like the Undermine Journal will be great resources to see where it is best to sell this little kitten.

The gold buying player who previously used an illegal service, will now consider what the likely value of the Cub will be, and decide to either buy gold, or buy the cub. I’d like to think that this will mean less gold purchases overall, but I am not sure. It will certainly change the price that gold sellers will charge.

It could be argued that the impact to other players is the value of that sack of gold. As if their is a flood of buying and selling, the overall value of gold will change. Yup, dead right – it will. It’s been changing since day one, and will continue to change. An end game BoE used to be a few hundred gold, which was a huge amount of gold. A player with 1000g was amazingly rich in the old game. Now players have huge amounts (probably between 20k-200k gold) and we have entire sub-sets of the community focusing on gold generation as their core gameplay.

I’d stagger a guess though that the value of the sack will still not be a game changer. A game changer would be just letting a player buy a sack for money direct from the vendor.

This is not real money transactions, and I can’t see how it will affect my game-play at all..

You’re an idiot if you think that BoEs were not being traded for real money before (I know that calling potential readers idiots is a bad thing, but really c’mon) via indirect methods, and this change makes it more likely for the buyer and seller to use the Cub as a form of conversion.I know for a fact that it used to happen because an ex-guildie offered me real money for a nice blue helm once, and I was very tempted.

This is not breaking the bank, and is only going to hurt those who were dodgy to begin with.To my mind this only makes the gold sellers job more difficult, as the players can now circumvent a large part of their offering.

Bad for the bad sellers, good for the developer, and good for the player who was previously buying gold as they get gold from a legitimate source.

This is a simple one – When you tank in LFD you get around 80g extra, some points that you may not need (so convert to BoE gear) and the chance at a pet. I’ve been selling the pets for a reasonable amount of cash, and making some ok gold.Thus far a few more common Alliance pets (30-50g), a few rares (1000+g), and two Horde pets that hopefully sell for a reasonable amount (3-5k each?).

So the daily grind is not so bad in tank land. It is not a 1000-2000g per hour strategy, but being paid a little extra to suffer through the LFD is good. Pity the lowbie tanks don’t also get the reward – my mid 70s Warrior could use some extra cash too.

Well it has been three weeks since I thought to start gearing up, and my effort to gear up via making a huge pile of cash from the AH is not going well. I’ve increased my gold total by about 3k. Given that the gear I want to buy costs ~60k, I’m a long way short. Only 60 weeks to go at this rate (shudder). I have had some very expensive expenses as I spend gold on mounts, gear changes, glyphs, and all sort of other strange items. In terms of income the figure is more like 5-6k, and I’ve been spendthrift.

You see I’ve not really changed my (poor) analysis methods, or started converting materials into items to re-sell. Part of my hesitation is that I may need some of those materials later, but really it is because I love to horde mats.

I’m a womble at heart.

I’ve looked at the current craftables that are performing well for which I have patterns, and there is money to be made. There is also however a slowly closing window for this opportunity as more players enter the manufacturing market, and the demand drops off as players buy what they need. The real burst time for profit is probably past, and now it is about considering the goal vs the cost.

When I thought that the mats could be redeveloped into around 40k of gold, that meant that I could get a fair way along my goal – which is better gear. But then the gearing through the dailies is reasonable, and the rep rewards are very solid. I think a better approach might be to do the same effort of slowing building a gold base, but spending that gold on rewards that are ever decreasing in cost is not something I want to rush.

e.g. A really smick one handed axe was selling for upward of 35k, and it now sits around 22-28k depending on the day. That is a very large drop in price in a short period.The axe is BoE drop, so there will be more at a steady rate, and the demand will decrease.

So I continue to ponder options and review what items to craft. My mats are steadily increasing and via the odd bargain, some clever use of mats, and some questing I think I can maintain a steady growth of my gold base at around 1k per week – after all the repairs and upgrade costs are included. That is an OK way to play for somebody who only really gets online 2 nights a week.

A few days ago a gold beggar made me laugh, but not because of what they did, but because of the circumstances around their efforts to spam folks.

We were happily wasting our time in game, when a guildie named Genowen piped up on vent that she was getting personal messages from a gold beggar; but what made these different is that they were in full sob story style. Almost propper RP style.

I chuckled and we kept playing. About 10 minutes later I get this:

I actually laughed out loud, Genowen would certainly ignore a beggar and it made the experience a little less like spam and more like a real story.

Because I am an alt-a-holic with a short attention span….I started a toon on a server where I have no others, and was worried about the cash flow. Initially it sucked not having any cash for the 35-50 silver items that would make questing a little easier.

Now that I’ve spend a little while leveling Herbalism to around 170 and Inscription to 150, gold is not an issue. Some very cheap Glyphs sell well. 20 minutes of farming can make you 8-10g. For a low level toon that is a frigging fortune. There is no excuse for gold begging. Continue reading →